Muslim Cab Driver Attack Update: Attacker’s Journal Filled With “Anti-Muslim” Material
There’s more information today about Michael Enright, the man charged with attacking a New York City cab driver after asking if he was Muslim:
A Queens cabbie said Wednesday night he saw “so much hate” in the face of a boozed-up bigot who slashed him after asking if he was Muslim.
Driver Ahmed Sharif said he pleaded for his life as knife-wielding suspect Michael Enright launched a bloody attack Tuesday after hailing the yellow cab in Kips Bay.
Sharif said the blond-haired Enright told him, “As-salaam alaikum” – which means “peace be unto you” in Arabic – before committing the crazed assault.
“I begged him, ‘Please don’t kill me,'” Sharif, 43, told the Daily News. “I was thinking about my four kids. If I’m gone, there is no one to care for them.”
Enright, 21, a film student from upstate Brewster, was arraigned yesterday on charges of attempted murder and assault, both as hate crimes. He was ordered held without bail pending another hearing Monday.
Enright, a senior at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, returned from Afghanistan in May after 35 days of filming a documentary about front-line troops.
When he was arrested Tuesday in midtown, Enright had a personal diary filled with pages of “pretty strong anti-Muslim comments,” a police source said.
The source said Enright’s journal equated Muslims with “killers, ungrateful for the help they were being offered, filthy murderers without a conscience.”
It still isn’t clear what Enright’s real connection is with a group that has come out in favor of the Park 51 project, but it would seem that any suggestion that this was some kind of hoax attack has been presumptively rebutted.
Truly weird.
Further in the article it says:
“Friends of Enright were baffled, but said he had become short-tempered and withdrawn since returning from Afghanistan. ‘He seemed a lot more quiet. He seemed to be a lot more pulled back than he used to,’ said a friend, who asked not to be identified.”
There was some speculation yesterday from Josh Marshall and others that something may have happened in Afghanistan.
“Truly weird.”
It hasn’t sprung a leak then Jim?
[i]There was some speculation yesterday from Josh Marshall and others that something may have happened in Afghanistan.[/i]
While he’s clearly on the deranged side to move from anger to actual violence, it will still be interesting to hear more of this story. “Muslims who are ungrateful for the help being offered” – this sounds to me like he doesn’t understand a basic fact: not everyone in Afghanistan wants to be “liberated.”
Quoting “a police officer” and “a source” for the alleged contents of a journal that must surely be locked away in an evidence locker (i.e. not passed around for casual examination)?
Think I’d be a bit careful about chasing the line of narrative, considering the lack of official notice. I understand the left is anxious to build a story of either A) a closet conservative, or B) a complete fruitcake who hid his views from the pro-park51 employer… but I would caution against getting too far ahead of provable facts.